Assessment Validation Services
Need extra rigor in your assessment? We’ve got you!
Ensure Assessment Reliability and Validity
What is “Psychometrics”?
Psychometrics combines psychology and metrics to create accurate and precise assessments.
What is a Psychometrician?
Psychometricians follow a disciplined development process that has been shown to produce the most reliable and valid assessments. It starts with defining the constructs to be measured, then working through several steps to build the test and gather the information that allows them to refine the instrument. Refinements may involve writing new items and repeating data collection and analysis.
Why Hire a Psychometrician?
Hiring a psychometrician is highly beneficial if you want to ensure the reliability and validity of your test. Psychometricians are experts in the field of measurement and assessment, specializing in the design, development, and evaluation of tests. They possess the knowledge and skills necessary to create tests that accurately measure what they are intended to measure.
Assessment Validation Process
A psychometric consultant can help you through the process of designing, creating, evaluating, and making your assessment ready for use. The process has been broken into a set of steps to help explain what you need to do to create an assessment from scratch and to help you identify the kind of help you may need from a psychometrician. The steps are further explained below the graphic.
- Construct definition: You start with defining what you want your assessment to measure. This will be highly dependent on your area of expertise and what you want to be able to offer your clients. The highest quality assessment starts with this step. It is important that you get this step correct.
- Test specifications: In this step, you write a blueprint of what the assessment should look and feel like. For example, do you want multiple-choice questions or a rating scale? How long or short do you want your assessment to be? Do you want to sort people into different types or compare them to others on different dimensions?
- Writing items (assessment questions): Having a clear idea of the construct you wish to measure and the types of questions you want to ask, you are now ready to start writing the questions.
- Gathering participant data: Build the test on Assessment Generator and invite people who are representative of your client base to evaluate the assessment. Use this as an opportunity to get their feedback on their experience. Use the data you collect for running psychometric analyses in the next step.
- Analyzing the data: Run statistics to evaluate the reliability and validity of the assessment. Document the results and determine what steps must be taken to improve the assessment further.
- Refinements: This step can occur before or after the assessment is published for use, depending on how well the results look in step 5. If validity and reliability are good, then refinements may not be necessary. Otherwise, another round of item writing, gathering information, and data analysis may be needed.
- Score reporting: The final step is to create compelling and useful score reports.
Whether you want to measure interests, values, attitudes, or personality, having a psychometrician to guide the assessment process would be invaluable. By hiring a psychometrician, you ensure that your test undergoes a rigorous and scientific process to meet the highest standards of reliability and validity. This, in turn, enhances the credibility and defensibility of your test results, making them more meaningful and trustworthy for your intended purposes.
Kathy Tuzinski, MA, has over 25 years of experience developing tests and assessments. Prior to starting Human Measures in 2018, Kathy held several senior R&D roles focused on assessments at SHL, Personnel Decisions International, and Inscape Publishing. Her expertise is developing situational judgment tests, skills-based tests, and personality assessments for use in personnel selection and training/development programs. She is an author and co-author of multiple research articles and book chapters pertaining to assessment. She has a master’s degree in industrial and organizational psychology from the University of Minnesota.